The Scattered and the Dead (Book 2)

by McBain, Tim

  “Izzy, calm down!” The kid wriggled like a caught fish pulled from the water, grunting with the effort of trying to break free. “You’re not making sense.”

  She seemed to steady herself then. Not all the way, but she took a few breaths without speaking. Her face was splotchy from all the yelling, and Erin saw the beginning of tears in her eyes.

  She didn’t want Izzy to cry, but it was at least a reaction she could understand. She hadn’t realized it in all the commotion, but Izzy’s outburst scared her. Made her worry that the kid had maybe started going a little cuckoo after everything they’d been through.

  “Look,” she said. “Look inside.”

  Erin glanced over her shoulder at the cabin. What could she possibly need to see in there? She had a few ideas. None of them good. But she moved closer to the window anyway, to appease Izzy.

  She ducked her head and squinted past her reflection in the glass. It was dim inside and took her pupils a few seconds to adjust. The first thing to catch her attention were the supplies — a bottle of lantern oil and a roll of paper towel. Those would be worth taking.

  “Do you see?” Izzy asked, and Erin was reminded she was supposed to be looking for something else.

  Her eyes scanned the interior until she found it. There, poking out of the crumpled sleeping bag. As she suspected. A body. Really, all she could see was a socked foot, but it was enough. A puddle of crusted vomit lay nearby. She’d already seen this scene a hundred times.

  Erin sighed. “I see.”

  Izzy pulled at her jacket again, a little of the frenzy back in her voice.

  “We have to help him! We have to help Squirrelman!”

  Erin’s mouth dropped open. So not only had the kid gone nuts, but she was naming the dead bodies now. Great.

  Erin closed her mouth and got down on one knee, like a football coach trying to rally the team on the sideline.

  “Izzy, that person is dead.” She kept her voice low and steady. “This is just like all the others. There’s nothing we can do.”

  “No!” Izzy flailed away from her. Erin tried to grab at her coat, but the kid dodged out of reach. Erin’s hands grasped at empty space and the lurching motion sent her sprawling into the grass. The snow stung her cheek and the slivers of exposed skin at her wrists.

  “Goddammit, Izzy!”

  Erin scrambled to her feet, but by the time she caught up to the kid it was too late. She was already through the cabin door and inside.

  Deirdre

  The Compound

  9 years, 23 days after

  Mud squished below, and the beaten path of the trail protested with loud suction noises every time she lifted a foot. The ground gripped her toes and heels, holding on like a plunger, trying its best to rip her shoes off. The sloppy sound reminded her of the rain from the night before, reminded her of the hole, of Shelly.

  Her hand swiped at her eyes. What had she gotten herself into?

  She lifted her gaze from the ground to look out ahead. Wind pushed the branches around, and the leaves waved at the tips of every limb. People scurried off to her right, the sound of them growing as she drew near the crowd.

  She walked through the market district now, the shady end where the booths were all cluttered with scavenged junk, most of it from the dead cities. Human chatter filled the air in all directions, bartering, begging, elaborate sales pitches that bordered on stealing. Clusters of people talked to each other, arms crossed over their chests.

  Kids sat under the booth to her right, two boys and a girl, malnourished-looking things with swollen bellies. They looked lethargic. Almost motionless. Crappy toys lay alongside them, untouched. Flies fluttered about their heads, spiraling down to land on the smallest kid’s moist looking eyelids over and over. He blinked and waved them away.

  She moved on, looking away. If you stared too long at these things, you’d have to think about them, which seemed to go against the customs around here. Everyone else seemed to see these brutal reminders of poverty as part of the scenery, another obstacle to step over on their way to work, but she couldn’t get used to it that way.

  “Killer deals over here. You wanna buy somethin’?” a voice called to her.

  She looked at the ground again, kept right on walking. Nothing good ever came from making eye contact down here. Nothing at all.

  Shelly walked by around dusk, mud still caked to her face from her time below ground. She didn’t look at Deirdre’s house, didn’t seem to look anywhere, just stared straight ahead, eyes still and dead like a zombie’s.

  Deirdre watched her through the window, tucked back where she knew she wouldn’t quite be visible to the people outside. She sipped her metal cup of water and waited, eyes glued to the walkway.

  Nothing moved out there, so her eyes traced up and down the cinder block stilts holding up the house across the walk. All of the houses out here sat up on blocks like that in case the river flooded, which it usually did about twice a year. These buildings were more shacks than houses, really, Deidre always thought. Barely bigger than the shed she sat in when she pulled the hole shift.

  Many of the others hadn’t been away from the compound in years, and the youngest ones never had. Crazy to think that these crappy stilt sheds had become the norm to them, had become routine. Anyway, at least she had hers to herself since she’d landed a job with the City Guard. Most of the others had roommates. Two to four cots shoved into each little room. The homes with families could be crammed eight or ten deep.

  Shelly walked by again, the skin of her face now cleared of the dirt. With her complexion restored to its former state of creaminess, she looked more like herself, her old self, even if her eyelids sagged in a way that made her look half-awake. It appeared that she’d changed clothes as well. Deidre didn’t remember her outfit in particular, but the lack of mud smears pointed in that direction.

  Once Shelly passed, Deirdre chugged down the rest of her water and set the cup on the nightstand that stood between her chair and her cot. She slid her boots back on her feet, taking one last look out the window.

  When Shelly completely disappeared from view, she counted to 30 and slipped out the front door, padding down the concrete steps. She looked both ways. Nobody was around outside, and no faces lurked behind any windows.

  Good. Everything was going according to plan, at least so far.

  Erin

  Presto, Pennsylvania

  171 days after

  She fumbled with the gun at her belt as she staggered after Izzy. Her shadow passed over the threshold of the cabin and was swallowed by the gloom inside.

  She paused just past the door, blinking hard against the dimness and listening for any sounds of danger. It was quiet inside. And still. Dead still.

  Izzy was kneeling next to the sleeping bag at the far end of the room, and Erin let herself relax a little. Aside from a small bathroom tucked into one corner and a loft accessible by a wooden ladder, the cabin was one room. Easy to clear.

  Her boots thudded over the floorboards as she crossed the small space. She nudged the bathroom door all the way open with a toe and glanced inside. Empty. She snatched the half roll of toilet paper from the vanity and tucked it in the crook of her elbow. A little something for her efforts.

  Back at the ladder, she climbed up the first few rungs. Just enough to peek into the loft and make sure it was empty.

  But it wasn’t empty.

  There was food bunking up there. Lots of it. This was the stash she’d been looking for. She grinned a big open-mouthed smile. Her chapped lips stung at the effort, but she couldn’t help it.

  In her giddiness, she hopped backwards off the ladder, almost losing her balance when she hit the floor. She righted herself and brushed some dust from the hand that wasn’t clutching a pistol.

  Erin tucked the gun back in its place and fixed her sights on Izzy. The kid was leaning over the sleeping bag, one hand pressed into the downy folds. She was whispering to it. Whispering to a dead man. Christ. />
  She should be gentle with the kid. Yelling at her obviously wasn’t going to work, not when she was in this state. Plus, finding the cache of food was making her feel more forgiving.

  Erin crouched down next to Izzy, put a hand on her back.

  “Iz, it’s time to go.”

  “We can’t just leave! We have to help him.”

  “He’s dead, Izzy.”

  As the words left her mouth, she sensed movement from the corner of her eye. Something wriggled inside the sleeping bag. A matching feeling of horror squirmed in her chest. Another fucking zombie.

  “Get away from it!” She shoved Izzy aside and pulled out the Glock, aiming roughly for where she thought the head was tucked inside.

  What happened in the next few seconds went by in a blur.

  The thing in the sleeping bag moved again. Her finger tightened around the trigger. Izzy screamed, a high pitched wail that got cut off by the gunshot. The gun popped and jerked in her hand and Izzy slammed into her, knocking her to the ground.

  When Erin picked herself back up, her ears were ringing. She raised the gun again, bracing herself for the zombie’s attack. Nothing happened.

  Maybe she hadn’t missed after all. Maybe Izzy knocked her off target after the gun went off.

  She rolled herself to a seated position and took stock of her surroundings. Izzy was yelling at her, cursing her out from the looks of it, but she couldn’t really hear her over the buzzing.

  Upon further inspection, the sleeping bag appeared unharmed. No fluff protruding from a bullet hole. No blood.

  And then a small, brown thing scampered from underneath the folds of fabric and darted into the darkness at the far end of the room.

  Good God almighty. It wasn’t a zombie. It was rats. The corpse was being eaten by rats.

  Saliva filled her mouth, a sure sign that she was about the throw up.

  Go ahead, stomach, she thought. Give it your best shot. You’re empty. No cookies to toss. No chunks to blow.

  She closed her eyes and took a few breaths, willing the nausea to pass.

  She noticed that her hearing was starting to come back when Izzy latched onto her, screeching in her ear.

  “Why did you do that?”

  She gripped Erin’s coat and shook her, like Erin was the crazy one.

  “You almost killed him!”

  Erin pried Izzy’s hand from her collar.

  “He’s already dead!”

  Izzy seized her arm and dragged her closer. Erin resisted, but the kid had super-strength or something. Or maybe it was that Erin was weak from lack of food. Before Erin could stop her, Izzy whisked the top flap of the sleeping bag aside, revealing the prone form that lay beneath.

  Rotted, dessicated flesh with tiny rat nibbles taken out of it. That’s what she expected. Instead, Izzy revealed a corpse that was either very fresh or very well preserved, somehow. Maybe the cold weather? It occurred to her that the only bad smell in the cabin was that of old vomit. He hadn’t really started to decompose yet.

  He was young. Erin figured him to be around her own age. That alone made her want to look away, but for some reason she couldn’t.

  She looked upon him, unblinking, her brain recording the details.

  The halo of black hair surrounding his face like a dark cloud. The impossibly long lashes that followed the gentle curves of his eyelids. A little cluster of acne scars on one cheek, the remnants of adolescence. And a larger scar over his right temple that ran into his hairline, the small patch of hair there gone white from the injury.

  Usually it was the gore that upset her. The broken flesh and blood and mess. The insides spilled out. But this was different. No blood. No guts. Her breath caught in her throat, and she felt the prickle of oncoming tears in her nose.

  She wondered what had happened to him. From the looks of the cabin, he’d had things set up pretty good for himself. How had he failed, then? What fatal mistake had he made? Would it be the same one she eventually made?

  And then he moved, his chest seeming to shudder involuntarily, producing a weak, wheezing cough.

  Erin skittered backward, raising the gun again, but after a few rapid beats of her heart, she lowered it.

  Izzy was right. He wasn’t a zombie.

  It was worse than that.

  He was still alive.

  Ray

  The Compound

  200 days after

  The hammers working at the cabins pounded out a drumbeat which seemed to mark the passage of time for the next few weeks. They started slow in the morning, sparse, just one or two pounding away, the sound growing deeper, more solid as each nail disappeared into the wood and then starting over with the next nail. Then more and more workers got to it, and it turned into an endless drum fill, some staccato beat that flirted with chaos, falling in and out of making sense rhythmically. The beat died out in the evening, cutting off entirely out of respect for the night.

  Ray figured the wisps of snow they’d seen on the ride home with Fiona foretold another round of accumulation that would soon put a stop to the hammers and everything else. It didn’t happen that way.

  Instead, wherever Ray went in the camp, he could hear them. Up in the house on the hill, with the windows closed, he could hear the pounding, though it was small. Somehow the violence of the noise was what ventured that far, a percussive, metallic sound like a bunch of small explosions, he thought, like a bunch of cannons firing in the distance.

  Christmas had come and gone. New Year’s, too. Simple gifts were exchanged and a small amount of champagne was spread around to the point that everyone who wanted some got a little more than a thimbleful. Tasted good, though. Funny how alcohol could be counted among the resources so scavenged that it was now quite rare to come upon, gas being the other big one. Who would have guessed that guns and ammo would be a little less scarce than liquor? In any case, apart from those short breaks, the work continued.

  Ray didn’t lift a hammer himself. He went to do so once, but Louis and the others wouldn’t have it. They said he needed to save his strength for the road, for the recruiting missions that grew the flock slowly and steadily, scaling up their entire operation, from the laborers to the scavengers and so on.

  “Us knuckle draggers can handle this stuff,” Louis said. “What you do out there, none of us could do.”

  Ray thought about explaining that selling hope and salvation and community to people with none of the above wasn’t such a difficult job, that if these guys popped on a suit and trimmed their facial hair, it would go a long way toward doing the job, but he decided against it. Maybe Lorraine was right. Better to have them believe in him and his abilities as though they were magic, better to let him be the camp’s supernatural aide, its rallying point, and its talisman all at once. Taking these ideas away from them felt cruel, like spoiling the myth of Santa Claus for a child. So he just nodded and smiled, setting the hammer down.

  And so it went. The hammers beat on like the heart of the camp, that constant ticking sound that meant they were still alive. Ray still went out on the road, sometimes taking Lorraine with, sometimes not, and he brought back new recruits most every trip now. Their numbers swelled throughout that mild winter, a time he had written off for dead showed incredible growth.

  The weather didn’t interfere much. The ground stayed clear, almost entirely. It didn’t snow again for the rest of the winter. Not enough to stick, anyway. Bouts of freezing rain slowed their work for a few hours here and there, but it melted as quickly as it arrived.

  The grass got crunchy and the last of the green patches turned beige. The laborers braved some bitterly cold days, steam puffing from their nostrils and disappearing within seconds. But so long as the sun lit the sky, the beat of the hammers never ceased.

  New structures rose to fill empty patches of land. Crazy how that worked, Ray thought. Hammers swung and empty places became shelters, became homes. The cabins were built from kits. They’d managed to scavenge a large number of them,
though they were mismatched. Some looked like miniature barns. Some were little cedar garden sheds that would be better than no shelter at all, though perhaps not by much. A few had windows which didn’t come with the kits. They had to board up the openings, which gave the whole community a more ramshackle feel, Ray thought.

  None of the new cabins were as nice as the ones that had stood in this campground before they arrived, and even those were tiny and in various states of disrepair.

  Still, roofs angled above many heads now in what was once a barren slab of weeds, guards watched over the gated drive onto the property as they slept, and there were hot meals every day, enough for everyone. It was the start of something, something bigger, and Ray thought they could all feel that.

  When spring came, the whole operation would scale up. They’d look to produce food instead of relying solely on scavenged canned and dry stuff. Work on the garden Kate had planned would begin. They’d find chickens to put in the coops Louis had built, and then they’d have fresh eggs every morning.

  When he crunched through the frizzy grass where the garden and chickens would go, he somehow saw the future as a transparent layer laid atop the present. He saw rows of crops rising from the fertile field, stalks ands stems that swayed in the breeze.

  Every morning just before dawn he stood on the deck behind the house on the hill and smoked a single cigar as he looked down upon the cabins, upon the land that was becoming their community. He’d looked upon many real estate developments through the years, but this didn’t feel like that. It was something greater, something that transcended all of those things in the old world, a fact he could only fully grasp first thing in the morning.

  The cigar didn’t taste the best. They’d found a case in a gas station outside of Washington D.C. A little stale, all of them, but better than nothing. The smell of the smoke mingled with that of the burning wood curling out of the chimneys.